When the fusion settled and my body had fully adapted, a new horizon opened. Chakra flowed through me not as a trickle but as a river — broad, controlled, and bottomless. In minutes my reserves expanded again; the numbers in my head ticked up until my output matched the lowest tiers of a Kage. Mid-Kage power. It was obscene how quickly a vessel could be stretched when guided by three lifetimes of refinement.
Hagoromo's lessons — the faint echoes of the Sage's voice in my memory — folded into my awareness. From him I remembered a perception that was less an eye and more a skin: a field of awareness that could be stretched, tuned, and read like a loom. I called it Voss when I first heard the old name in a dream. Now I cast it outward.
My sensory field blossomed for kilometers. The village became a map of tremors and impressions; chakra flows shimmered like currents in a sea. Threads of corrupted technique snagged at the edges of my perception — dozens of tiny knots, hidden sigils sewn into the minds and bodies of Konoha's deeper operatives. Itachi's handiwork. Genjutsu seals, subtle and cold, wrapped around Root agents like a second skin.
Itachi had been busy. He'd left markers to control and retrieve, safety nets for himself. I traced the trail, a clean, cruel breadcrumb path leading to Root's hollowed centre. My mouth tasted of iron and calculation. This was information, and information was leverage.
I left the shrine like a shadow that knew its own shape. My chakra control — honed by Indra's disciplines and the surgical precision of the Uchiha eye — dropped to an almost nonexistent whisper. I felt my presence condense into a needlepoint. No animal startled. No sensor twitched. I moved with the stillness of sealed ink sliding over a page.
Root's perimeter was less guarded than most expected; the true defenses were mental. Men who pictured intruders saw phantoms; those who felt danger trusted orders. Any who glanced my way found themselves drowning in sleep. I did not burn them with fire or steel — I fed them soft, painless darkness with a pinprick of Sharingan genjutsu. Their knees gave, breaths evened, and they folded like unused dolls. Technique after technique: vanish, press, bypass. Indra's knowledge taught me the economy of movement; every flick and angle wasted nothing.
The base smelled of oil and old paper. Hallways curved like arteries. I kept to the walls, listening to the rhythm of boots and voices, cataloguing patterns. The ninjutsu scroll room — a vault of techniques Root hoarded and locked away from Konoha's public knowledge — was guarded by two sleeping sentries and a pressure grid I bypassed by stepping along breath and shadow. The scrolls in the room felt like cogs waiting to be put into motion; forbidden seals, tactical formations, and techniques altered for espionage and subterfuge. I let my fingers ghost along their bindings, and with the same care I used to gather eyes, I collected and stashed the most useful — shadow jutsu variants, sealing tricks, and movement techniques specialized for clandestine kills and disappearances.
Danzo's chamber lay at the heart of the base, weaved with ritual and paranoia. He had always sat at his throne of grafted eyes like a man who stitched a map into his own flesh. I found him where he always hid: in the dark, surrounded by the hum of stolen sight. He was not expecting me to be anything more than a child.
Expectations are dangerous things.
A single flare of my Mangekyō — practiced and precise — brushed his perception. The world around him folded with the cruelty of a page turned: a genjutsu so quiet he would think it his own mind betraying him. Muscle seized and calmed as I threaded the technique into his head. He convulsed subtly, an old man caught in a dream of falling, and in that breath I moved.
Body flicker — a sliver of motion carried by a perfect chakra pulse — closed the distance. The grafts and seams along Danzo's skull shivered like a tree in wind. I did not parley. I reached into the tissue like one reaches into a pocket to retrieve a coin. Shisui's Mangekyō had been a jewel implanted to serve another's hunger; it resisted and hissed and then stilled. With a surgeon's steadiness I removed the eye and sealed the flesh afterwards so cleanly no casual glance would notice the theft.
Danzo's lids fluttered as I withdrew. The genjutsu still held him, the sleep comfortable as a blank slate. I left him breathing and unaware.
Once outside, I did not run. I melted back into the village the way fog slides back into the river. Every step I took was folded under the smell of rain and woodsmoke. My presence was a rumor.
At the Naka Shrine I worked without hurry. The vials received Shisui's eye as if it were made for the glass. The stolen Danzo pieces — scrolls and small artifacts — I burned or hid; the important ones joined the others. The shrine's depths accepted my spoils like a patient host: Fugaku's Mangekyō still hummed faintly in its vial, Shisui's stared back like a calm sun, and the scrolls whispered their secrets into the air.
I placed each new eye where it belonged — catalogued, labelled, and stored with the same devotion I gave to a blade. The shrine thrummed with the accumulation of stolen sight. My own Mangekyō reflected the tiny suns of those vials: each a life, a skill, an imprint. Power was an accretion, and I had become a satellite of stolen orbits.
Alone in the shrine's quiet, I did not celebrate. Gratitude was for children and saints. Instead I catalogued, integrated, and planned. Shisui's eye would give me a finesse in genjutsu I could marry to Itachi's traps. Fugaku's predictive sight would sharpen my strategy until it could anticipate the ripple of a plan before the plan knew itself. The Root scrolls would teach me Konoha's shadows — where they buried secrets, who they trusted, what they feared.
Sasuke slept on my mind, that fragile ember at the edge of everything. Itachi had vanished into the strategy he always favored. Danzo's silence would ripple into the village; men would scratch their heads and blame ghosts. Root would close its doors and count its wounds. And I — Indra reborn — would weave threads through the confusion until everything moved according to my design.
When I closed my eyes in the shrine that night, I felt the new weights settle. My senses stretched and folded upon themselves, a map re-inked with new roads. The hunger for power was not satisfied; it sharpened. There were more pieces to take, more patterns to break, and a brother to craft into something unsurvivable.
Outside, Konoha slept, unknowing. Inside, in a forgotten shrine beneath the Uchiha compound, a child-king with the memories of gods packed his spoils and planned the first moves of a war that had already been won in his head.